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In today’s cannabis culture, there are mainly three factions, medical activists, decriminalization activists, and those of us who want total legalization. At GMLR we seek to create one unified front in the state of Georgia to end prohibition.

Few books have given me more hope about the end of cannabis prohibition than this insightful treatise. While he does touch on the ‘war on drugs’ in a broader sense, it is his comprehensive review of the last several years of medical studies which make this an invaluable book to have on hand if and when you find yourself defending cannabis in a discussion.

Stately in stature, immaculately dressed and erudite, the Hollywood socialite sits in a modest Jerusalem coffee bar and speaks with a conviction that only self-help gurus, born-again preachers and Herbalife salesmen seem to be able to muster these days.

She possesses traits found in all of them, this perky, middle-aged cancer survivor who has seen the light and discovered the purpose of her life – she’s the self-described “Martha Stewart of marijuana.” Like a pot evangelist on a mission, the founder of the Beverly Hills Cannabis Club and the Green Asset International Inc. hedge fund dramatically credits cannabis with bringing her back from the brink of death with advanced ovarian cancer, and is intent on spreading the marvels of medical marijuana to the rest of the world.

“In the 1990s, you had the dot.com boom in Silicon Valley. Well, the same thing is about to happen in the cannabis industry around the world – call it the pot.com boom,” laughs Shuman, taking a sip from a cold drink after spending the morning at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem’s Ein Kerem, home to medical marijuana pioneer Dr. Raphael Mechoulam. Only she’s being dead serious, explaining that according to estimates of US business experts, cannabis will be the foundation of a $47 billion industry by 2016.

Shuman has come to Israel to learn about the highly developed medical marijuana industry in Israel, where over 11,000 patients are licensed to use cannabis to ease symptoms of everything from nausea caused by chemotherapy to the lasting effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. She also hopes to create synergy with Israeli experts in the ﬁeld and recruit them in her efforts to make quality medical marijuana care available to all patients who need it. It may be a quirk of fate, or according to Shuman something more cosmic, that the organization hosting her stay in Israel is called Tikun Olam.

She and the country’s oldest and largest marijuana-growing dispensary have something in common – they’ve dedicated their energy to repairing the world – one bud of high-grade cannabis at a time. – FULL ARTICLE

Booker laid out a plan to provide more drug treatment, end mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders, decriminalize marijuana, increase funding for prisoner re-entry programs, and bring an end to for-profit, private prisons.

He also excoriated a prison system that incarcerates vastly higher numbers of African -Americans than whites for similar offenses.

“In New Jersey, blacks make up 14 percent of the state’s population but make up over 60 percent of our state’s prisons,” he said. “There is something fundamentally wrong with those numbers.”

The UK Misuse of Drugs Act (1971) divided controlled drugs into three groups – A, B and C – with descending criminal sanctions attached to each class. Cannabis was originally assigned to Group B, but in 2004, it was transferred to the lowest risk group, Group C.

In 2009, on the basis of increasing concerns about a link between high strength cannabis and schizophrenia, it was moved back to Group B.

Researchers from the University’s Department of Health Sciences examined admissions to psychiatric hospitals in England between 1999 and 2010 to explore whether the reclassifications in 2004 and 2009 were associated with changes in the admissions rate for cannabis psychosis.

They found that there was a significantly increasing trend in admissions from 1999 to 2004, but following the reclassification of cannabis from B to C in 2004, there was a decline until 2009. Following the second reclassification back to class B in 2009, there was once again a significant increase in admissions.

Both in the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament and in the Aramaic translation, the word ‘kaneh’ or ‘ keneh’ is used either alone or linked to the adjective bosm in Hebrew and busma in Aramaic, meaning aromatic. It is ‘cana’ in Sanskrit, ‘qunnabu’ in Assyrian, ‘kenab’ in Persian, ‘kannab’ in Arabic and ‘kanbun’ un /chaldean. In Exodus 30: 23, God directed Moses to make a holy oil composed of “myrrh, sweet cinnamon, kaneh bosm and kassia.” In many ancient languages, including Hebrew, the root ‘kan’ has a double meaning — both hemp and reed. In many translations of the Bible’s original Hebrew, we find ‘kaneh bosm’ variously and erroneously translated as “calamus” and “aromatic reed,” a vague term. Calamus, (Calamus aromaticus) is a fragrant marsh plant. The error occurred in the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, in the third century B.C., where the terms ‘kaneh, kaneh bosm’ were incorrectly translated as “calamus.” And in the many translations that followed, including Martin Luther’s, the same error was repeated. In Exodus 30: 23 ‘kaneh bosm’ is translated as “sweet calamus.” In Isaiah 43: 24 ‘kaneh’ is translated as “sweet cane.” although the word “sweet” appears nowhere in the original. In Jeremiah 6: 20 ‘kaneh’ is translated as “sweet cane.” In Ezekiel 27: 19 ‘kaneh’ is translated as “calamus.” In Song of Songs 4: 14 ‘kaneh’ is translated “calamus.”

Another piece of evidence regarding the use of the word ‘kaneh’ in the sense of hemp rather than reed among the Hebrews is the religious requirement that the dead be buried in ‘kaneh’ shirts. Centuries later, linen was substituted for hemp (Klein 1908).

In the course of time, the two words ‘kaneh’ and ‘bosm’ were fused into one, ‘kanabos’ or ‘kannabus,’known to us from Mishna, the body of traditional Hebrew law. The word bears an unmistakable similarity to the Scythian “cannabis.” Is it too far-fetched to assume that the Semitic word ‘kanbosm’ and the Scythian word ‘cannabis’ mean the same thing?